From time to time the New Zealand Council for Educational Research is asked how test results can contribute to making an Overall Teacher Judgement (OTJ). This is an important and complex question and one that we continue to grapple with. In this Assessment News article I begin to explore what ...

How can teachers support students' additive thinking? This article focuses on the study of a lesson designed to teach the equal additions strategy for subtraction, in which many teachers, despite having a strong commitment to promoting conceptual understanding, struggled with various aspects of the material and resorted to teaching procedurally ...

Recent attention to the idea of “student voice” provides an interesting framework for considering the articles in this edition of set: Research Information for Teachers as an overall collection. They cover a range of different issues, with a special focus on mathematics education. The potential to read a “voice” dimension ...

This study explored whether using process drama to teach social studies would engage Year 10 Pasifika boys at a secondary school in Auckland. The author describes how, while in role, students used their existing knowledge and experiences to explore and develop new knowledge, and how process drama addressed the goals ...

It is with great pleasure that we write an introduction to this special issue of the Early Childhood Folio on key learning competencies across place and time. Publication of these working papers (adapted and edited for the Early Childhood Folio) from a Teaching and Learning Research Initiative (TLRI) project ...

This article explores the shift from “essential skills” to “key competencies” in the school curriculum. Drawing on information gathered from teacher interviews and observations at a New Zealand primary school, this article suggests that culture and context strongly shape and influence the interpretation of key competencies. The authors develop a ...

The authors of this article had been exploring the notion of continuity for an individual learner, and this led them to also explore the notion of continuity within the bigger picture. They provide an example of what they call a centre storyline: an ongoing project that developed over an extended ...

In this article, Yvonne, a junior school teacher, describes how she decided to explore how key competencies could be integrated into the daily programme, and assessed, without creating extra workload for teachers. The article outlines how, with support from research co-ordinators Keryn and Sue, Yvonne developed a way in which ...

The authors work with infants and toddlers and had become interested in rethinking the language associated with learning dispositions in documented Learning Stories. They decided to develop a different language, one that better reflected their knowledge and understanding of under-2-year-olds and their learning. The teachers returned to the curriculum document, ...

Two teachers research the documentation, continuity and complexity of key competencies in their combined new entrant, Year 1 and Year 2 classroom. They wanted to find ways to make the continuity visible without losing the complex interconnection of three aspects: key competencies, subjects and topics of interest. They saw the ...